published in 1793 in a journal edited by Princess Dashkova, Catherine ordered its
entire print run destroyed and Dashkova dismissed, simply because the topic (not
its moral lesson) concerned revolution. The most celebrated case centered around
Alexander Radishchev’s 1790 publication, on his own printing press, of one of the
few overtly critical political works of the Russian eighteenth-century Enlighten-
ment,Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Modeled on Sterne’sSentimental
Journey, a traveler’s successive stops expose the abuses of serfdom and venal
officialdom and provide opportunities for sentimentalist, emotional appeals to
rulers to abolish serfdom and institute justice. Although Radishchev did not call
for overt rebellion, Catherine II took the work in those terms and sentenced him to
ten years of Siberian exile. In 1796 private presses were abolished and censorship
committees for imported books in major cities were created; more rigorous laws
were instated thereafter (1804, 1811, 1828, 1839, and 1851).
Overt critiques like Radishchev’s were rare; his was paralleled in his day only by
one other such work. Prince M. M. Shcherbatov wrote a scathing critique of
corruption and favoritism at Catherine II’s court in 1787–8, but entrusted it to
his family to remain unpublished (until 1896). These men pushed their educations
to the logical limits: French Enlightenment thought to which they were exposed in
their European educations did indeed challenge them to rectify injustice and create
social equality. But these men were exceptions. Many Russian noblemen and
intellectuals of their time were concerned with abuses of serfdom, venality in the
judicial system and the corrupt insularity of the imperial court. But few questioned
the empire’s institutions—autocracy, Church, serfdom, social estates. Rather, as we
have sketched out, they strove for moral improvement—perfecting the individual,
the landlord, the autocrat.
Marc Raeff, the brilliant student of the eighteenth century, argued that the life
course of eighteenth-century noblemen—raised without strong parental input,
domineering over their serfs, like their fathers peripatetically serving across the
empire—left them psychologically alienated. Men like Radishchev and Shcherba-
tov, trained in Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris to believe in universal human rights and to
serve humanity, returned to Russia tofind no place for such humanitarian dreams.
In Raeff’s dramatic reading this fateful tension created the critical intelligentsia of
the nineteenth century. Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii complemented Raeff’s
hypothesis of psychological alienation by reading the eighteenth century through
the prism of the nineteenth. In the literary trope of“superfluous man”found in
Pushkin, Lermontov, and others, they found a nobility that was essentially theat-
rical, not authentic. Emblematic of their view is Alexander Herzen’s observation of
the 1840s: in Europe the nobility“dresses,”while the Russian nobility“dresses up.”
These stimulating paradigms provoked decades of scholarship on the nobility—
Michael Confino and Boris Mironov, Douglas Smith and Ol’ga Glagol’eva,
Wirtschafter and Whittaker, and many others have pored over memoirs, prose
and poetry, cultural habits, dress and portraiture, interactions with serfs, provincial
estate life. They generally reject the idea that Russia’s eighteenth-century nobility
was psychologically adrift, and depict an estate that was grounded, loyal to state and
service, connected to family and corporate group, committed to social justice
446 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801